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WebKit Gives Konqueror a Speed Boost (Past Firefox)
An anonymous reader writes "We always knew that WebKit is going to make Konqueror fast; but how much faster? Today we test that by putting Konqueror with KHTML through the SunSpider JavaScript Test and the then do the same with WebKit. To get an idea of how fast they are compared to other browsers, we also decided to put Firefox 4.0 Beta 2 through the tests."
I Guess they finally Konquered that speed barrier they were dealing with. If you look at their old speed numbers you'll see that they used to perform like an old lady crossing the street. Now it's more like the car racing away after running over the old lady.
How important are JavaScript times to the overall speed of rendering pages?
Is it like comparing 0-60 times for cars (a decent indication of performance, though not the best)? Or is a bit like measuring the time from 0-10 in first gear - a rather insiginificant proportion of the whole time taken to render a cross-section of typical web pages?
Do sites just concentrate of JavaScript performance so much because it's easier to measure?
It is the default browser in KDE, unless your distro changed it to Firefox. If you use Gnome, or OSX or Windows, you probably won't get to see it.
it is the predecessor of webkit. webkit was forked from konquerors html rendering engine.
Is work continuing on KHTML, and -- if so -- why? I mean, KHTML surely has some stuff going for it (it was the basis for WebKit), but it seems like there's a really clear winner.
It's what spawned Webkit; which in turn is the most mature modern browser engine available on current Amigas, you know...
One that hath name thou can not otter
Firefox 4 Beta 2 is so yesterday, today Firefox 4 Beta 3 is all the rage.
JaegerMonkey is making steady progress in improving performance and in a couple of months or so will likely be on par with Nitro and V8.
You mean, in several months Mozilla will be approaching the level that Google is at now. It's become pretty clear that Google is able to develop Chrome much faster than Mozilla is able to develop Firefox.
Also, Opera is faster than Mozilla as well, I'd like to see it included on that chart to compare with the others. Maybe even IE9, if it doesn't skew the Y-scale too much.
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
You need to getting laid.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
It must be noted that the WebKit support in Konqueror is very limited in many ways, and this may matter more to many people than a JavaScript speedboost. It does NOT, for example, allow you to run Java applets. http://websvn.kde.org/*checkout*/trunk/KDE/kdelibs/kdewebkit/ISSUES
My personal opinion is that all other written-for-WebKit browsers are better choices compared to Konqueror+kpart for those who want a browser with WebKit rendering at this point.
9/11: Never forget it was a false-flag operation
v8 only runs on ARM and x86.
That's because the market has chosen to give a care only about these instruction sets. Can you name a computing product sold this month that 1. runs a web browser, 2. isn't marketed primarily as a video game console, and 3. uses something other than ARM or x86 as its primary CPU?
How important are JavaScript times to the overall speed of rendering pages?
Try (ab)using Konqueror/KHTML as your primary/only browser for a month and you will soon get frustrated by simple things like the What You See Is What You Get on your blog software not working.
I personally do not give a damn about JavaScript performance. It matters zero to me. JS runs "fast enough" in all browsers.
It does matter a whole lot to me that the JavaScript on sites runs as expected.
I do not care if a piece of JavaScript does not work slow or fast.
9/11: Never forget it was a false-flag operation
Everybody is all friendly again, but some have long memories
And some have very faulty memories:
Kong (KHTML) was ripped off by Apple,
KHTML was forked by Apple.
and they began the work on webkit as a closed source project
They worked on it internally, more-or-less secretly until the first version of Safari, when they released their code at the same time they shipped the binaries.
After some serious (legal) prodding,
After a number of KHTML developers bitched publicly.
Apple finally did the right thing and returned their changes to the community
Apple moved development into public svn rather than providing large (and difficult to merge) patch drops with each release. They also began soliciting external contributions from companies like Nokia, Adobe, and so on, as well as from the wider community.
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Sunspider Test
Firefox-3.5.9-Linux: 2331.6ms
Opera-10.61-Linux: 868.2ms
Chromium-6.0.492.0-Linux: 865.6ms
I would have posted links to the results but apparently there were too many non-letter characters per line (even with the links inside href attribs).
v8 only runs on ARM and x86.
That's because the market has chosen to give a care only about these instruction sets. Can you name a computing product sold this month that 1. runs a web browser, 2. isn't marketed primarily as a video game console, and 3. uses something other than ARM or x86 as its primary CPU?
x86_64 :P
Even pdftex, which produces nicer output than most browsers and runs incredibly slowly can do about ten pages a second of text-and-image layout and a web browser only needs to finish laying out one screen full quickly - anything off the screen just needs to be finished before the user scrolls that far down the page.
Not always. The layout of an element further down the page can have effects higher up the page. Think of a multiple-screen-tall element using CSS display: table with inner elements using display: table-row and display: table-cell. This can be either a <div> element using a grid layout or an actual <table>; the effect is the same.
The impressive part is that Chrome has managed already to beat Firefox in several areas
In a few areas, yes, and only because they could benefit from the many years of experience gathered in the development of web browsers. When Firefox first hit the scene, a JITing JS engine wasn't even a consideration, as top-notch JS performance simply wasn't that important. The same goes with things like tab and plugin isolation, etc.
I mean, don't get me wrong, Chrome is a very nice piece of work, and Google has the advantage of having a number of paid engineers working on it full time, with a focused vision. My comment was only meant to inject a little perspective into the discussion.
Chrome uses Webkit!
Apple Safari uses Webkit!
Nokia uses Webkit!
KDE Konqueror uses Webkit, in fact it was invented by them under the name KHTML.
So imagine that KDE's Konqueror will benefit from Webkit progress, now that they support webkit along KHTML
KDE 4.x already available on Windows, and probably on OS X as well (never tried). The first ports of Konqueror were pretty weak, but these days it works nicely enough. I wouldn't call it a must-have program on Windows, but if you like the KDE apps (ark, kate, and amorak are some others that I like) then you can get them from http://windows.kde.org/ (it includes a package manager for updating, which is really nice). It looks like the current version is KDE 4.4.0.
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...
Well, that joke will eventually hit +5 funny but, let me tell what happened today.
Was in market for a end user VPN account, you know they really depend on your IP to their IP speed/path. The largest and known/old VPN provider for such use has made all speed tests in Java. As I was testing something on OS X 10.4.11 Tiger (read as: OLD) and Apple stopped updating Tiger long time ago, along with security updates, I don't dare to enable "applets".
So until the gcc451 test was finished, I was prisoned on that partition.
This is exactly why people want the possibility of having flash/java applet and even shockwave on their browser. Not because they love 3rd party stuff, because a page out there may feature them and that page could matter to you.
I love watching people attack Larry Ellison/Oracle and Java in same context instead of questioning the "cool" guys like Apple and Google.
Konquerer is sort of like a NASAR Sprint Cup car - fast, but not the best tool for most jobs, and more of a novelty than something I'd want to drive every day. Some people love each of this things, and I think most of these people are silly, uneducated, and love to ignore the real world.
This is a hacked account, for which the owner can not be held responsible.
If beta 3 has been out for about a week?
It wasn't. Beta 3 was released on the 11th, the article was published on the 12th.